Collaborative Spoken Word Poetry with AI
Structure for leading an in-class creative activity, based in iterative theatrical devising and driven by group collaboration with generative AI.
This Lehigh AI Project provides a structure for a creative activity in order to experiment with and reflect upon the potential of AI for artistic collaboration. Over the course of a 75-minute in-class exercise, students (or other participants) engage in an iterative artistic process with text- and image-generating AI applications. Over a sequence of steps, students develop a creative work that incorporates poetic text, digital imagery, and embodied performance. The process combines individual effort and group decision-making, entangling both in artistic collaboration with AI. The exercise concludes with a presentation of the work to their peers and a reflective discussion about creation, authorship, and originality. The design of this exercise is modeled after general devising techniques in theatrical practice as well as the 'cut-up' method popularized by William S. Burroughs.
This project presents a structured walkthrough of the creative activity, documenting the instructions, reasoning, and supplemental notes for each step in order for an instructor to guide the class in AI artmaking and reflection.
